Crowdfunding sites allow an easy mechanism for fundraising in communities that may have social networks and organizations, but not the robust money-raising infrastructure of already-established mainstream institutions. This is a place modern Paganism is in today, and more and more of us are turning to these sites as a solution to our “money problem.” There are hundreds of thousands of Pagans out there, millions around the world, and they desire to see our projects and initiatives advance just as much as any other faith community. So here are some Pagan Fundraising Initiatives that you might want to contribute to.

My name is Tamara Siuda. I’m an Egyptologist. (Yes, I’ve even played one on TV.) I’ve been translating hieroglyphs, teaching, and writing about ancient Egyptians for two decades. A few years ago, I published The Ancient Egyptian Prayerbook. It includes translations of prayers, hymns, and magical incantations from Egypt’s pharaonic times. It also includes a very basic ancient calendar, because there wasn’t room for all my research. I’d like to give that calendar some more attention. With your help, I can publish The Ancient Egyptian Daybook. This Daybook will include all my research into ancient Egypt’s calendar. It will also include an optional blank perpetual calendar in a journal or planner format, so you can keep track of these holidays today, if you want!

With a little over a week left, she’s making plans for 10K, 20K, and 40K “stretch” goals, with various incentives. So if you want to jump on this project before the fundraising window closes, now’s the time. Wild Hunt columnist Stacey Lawless will be writing more about this fundraiser in her next column, which will also touch on her PantheaCon experiences. I think Pagans looking at how to do a successful crowdfunding initiative should study all the things that Tamara Siuda did right.

Commemorative Blue Plaque For Doreen Valiente:Doreen Valiente is rightly called the “mother of modern Witchcraft” by many, and her writings have had a huge shaping influence on religious Witchcraft as a whole. The Centre For Pagan Studies is currently raising funds to place the first in a series of commemorative blue plaques to honor Valiente and other key figures in modern Pagan history.

“The first Blue Plaque is the Doreen Valiente Plaque. We have been working on this for a number of years with Brighton and Hove City Council and we are pleased to announce that Doreen’s Plaque will be going on the wall at the apartments where she lived for 30 years and the location where she did most of her seminal writing. The event will take place on the Summer solstice this year – i.e. 21st June 2013. We are having to pay for the commemorative plaque ourselves so we need your help to raise 1200 pounds. This is to cover 750 pounds manufacturing cost and the remainder is for the installation. Time is short so please donate to this great cause. This will be a number of firsts. The plaque as afar as we can find out will be the first council apartment block. It certainly will be the first plaque that celebrates the life of one of our own. There are plaques commemorating the wrong doings, but this is the first to honor a witch.”

The Temple of Witchcraft campaign to raise funds for the improvement of their new temple headquarters continues apace, having reached the halfway mark with 50 days to go. They are pushing for an ambitious $68,000 and have already raised nearly $40,000. Temple co-founder Christopher Penczak says: “You might ask, why a parking lot and why now? The answer is: No Parking Lot, No Temple. The Temple of Witchcraft bought a building to hold rituals and classes in our New Hampshire location. But we can’t use it for its intended purpose until we build a parking lot to comply with town codes. And we can’t do that until we raise $68,000 dollars. We’re still keeping the former site open. That costs, too.”

Those are the highlighted campaigns for this edition. Please send me word of your crowdfunding campaigns, and I may spotlight them on a future edition of this ongoing feature. Let’s all work together to promote important projects within our community, and destroy the notion that we can’t or won’t fund projects that are important to us. If you can’t donate, the best way to help is to share these campaigns to your social networks, exposing them to as many people as possible. Thanks for reading, and thank you for supporting Pagan community!

There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

“By the end of the film I was weeping: for Hypatia, for our destroyed Pagan history, and for humanity itself, that doggedly pursued zealotry and ignorance over and above knowledge and reason.” – T. Thorn Coyle

Even those who had some troubles with the historical changes made in Amenábar’s film, like feminist scholar Max Dashu, were generally positive about the work as a whole.

“I’m not a movie reviewer, but a cultural historian, and approach the film from that perspective. What did they do right? Casting the talented Rachel Weisz was an excellent choice, and all the actors are good. The cinematography is luscious. I liked the thematic return to views of the heavens, with the night sky seen from a balcony or through the open roof of an atrium, and occasionally pulling back to satellite shots of earth. A sympathetic treatment of Pagans is not something you often see in historical movies.”

“The Tempest Julie Taymor is a director of adequate fearlessness. She can be gimmicky (“Across the Universe’’). She can even be somewhat conventional (“Frida’’). But she’s always interesting. In this version of the Shakespeare desert-island play, she’s cast Helen Mirren as Prospero (it’s Prospera now). Djimon Hounsou is Caliban, Felicity Jones is Miranda. Ben Whishaw is Ariel, David Strathairn is Alonso, Chris Cooper is Antonio, and Russell Brand is Trinculo. See? Interesting.”

“Women have been punished for being powerful for many centuries and I thought that was the remarkable thing about making Prospero into Prospera. You can bring in that history of female struggle. We can see now in the extreme fundamentalist states, whatever religion they are, that they want to exclude women from education. An educated female sex is dangerous for the status quo, they believe. Women with any interest in education are persecuted for being witches, herbalists, evil. I thought of all these women, now and throughout history, as I was playing Prospera.“

I’m just hoping that Prospera decides to not renounce her magic at the end. Plus, with Taymor directing you know it’s going to be a visual feast. Once there’s a trailer, I’ll post it for you. “The Tempest” is set for release on December 17th. Other interesting-looking films include “Tibet in Song” (November 12th), and “Vision: From The Life OfHildegard Von Bingen” (November 5th).

“[Rachel Weisz’s] star turn as Hypatia, a scholar and astronomer of pagan background who preaches tolerance and brotherhood in late fourth-century Alexandria while scientifically probing the secrets of the solar system, is apparently not the stuff that draws Americans to the box office … highly prized internationally and Spain’s highest grossing film in 2009; yet it struggled for distribution in the United States before its release here on May 28. With a female intellectual as its hero and Christian fanatics as its villains, Agora’s limited American appeal is perhaps understandable.“

Is it as simple as that? Christian villains and an intellectual hero? If so, Dan Brown’s thrillers (Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons) wouldn’t have drawn hundreds of millions at the box-office. I think the answer is more complex than that. It is partially the fault of a timid distribution market, afraid of courting controversy (or at least the wrong kind of controversy), which allowed the film to wait in limbo for months. I also think the nature of the “Christian villains” is significant. It isn’t a few elites pulling strings and hatching evil plans, “Agora” certainly has those but it also shows Christian mobs killing pagans and Jews. It holds up a piece of history that many would like to forget, when the persecuted minority, now risen to power, started inflicting its own evils on the wider world.

“Christine Jones, 73, of Satellite Beach, says she wrote Sybil Leek: Out of the Shadows as a tribute to the woman she says was a teacher and a warm and gentle friend. “She was like Mother Earth,” Jones said. Leek was one of the most famous practitioners of Wicca, a pagan faith sometimes known as Witchcraft or Craft. She made hundreds of television appearances in the U.S. and the United Kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s and wrote dozens of books, including Diary of a Witch. She even reportedly was an astrologer for former First Lady Nancy Reagan. Leek died in 1982 in Melbourne Beach. Jones said she met Leek in the 1970s, after an out-of-body experience led her to contact Leek for help understanding what had happened to her. After moving to Florida in 1977, Jones, then a nurse, studied one-on-one with Leek — the last such student, Jones said. The biography, which Jones said took her several years to write, is a personal look at a woman who was simultaneously larger than life and “so normal.”

You can pre-order the book at Pendraig Publishing. I suspect you’ll also be able to order it through Amazon soon enough as well. Biographies are a rare thing within our communities, so I’ll always welcome one more.

Pastor Danny Nalliah of the Catch the Fire Ministries. He claims that a godless Gillard is out to ”destroy our Judeo-Christian heritage,” outlaw worship altogether and turn Australia into another ”Communist China” … Melbourne witch and high priestess Lizzy Rose and her coven will invite Ms Gillard’s energy into their magic circle to speak about ”her intentions of where she is taking the country”. Ms Rose says her divinations ”will prove to us whether Julia is going to govern through ego or through her heart space”. If Ms Gillard, an avowed atheist, passes the ”heart-space” test, Ms Rose says she’ll get the endorsement of her Order of Wisdom, Learning and Light. ”We’re not trying to recruit her against her will,” she says. ”We see her as a high priestess anyway, regardless of her atheism.”

Now, I can see that an atheist might think both are equally loony. But Brayton goes on to call the Wiccans “creepy” and “every bit as bad as the egregious stupidity being offered by the fundamentalist Christians”. Really? Every bit as bad? One thinks Gillard is a devil who wants to impose Communist rule, and the other wants to speak to her energy body in a circle and honors her as a priestess, and those reactions are equatable? I mean, I get that he thinks all religion is crazy, but these reactions are not coming from the same place, or have the same intentions. In all honesty I think Lizzy Rose might have chosen to keep that ritual to herself, but she is harming no-one and is certainly not the provocateur that Nalliah is. To equate them is silly at best, and at worst drives wedges between atheists and other religious minorities that might find common cause.

“In 1979 the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of Montana became the first in the nation to set aside tribal land—92,000 acres of the Flathead Reservation’s mountains and meadows—as wilderness. Since then, the Nez Perce have acquired 16,286 acres of ancestral lands in northeast Oregon that they will manage solely to benefit fish and wildlife. The Assiniboine and Sioux tribes in northeastern Montana are working to bring back bison on the Fort Peck Reservation. In Minnesota the Chippewa, or Ojibwa, have restored a ravaged walleye population at Red Lake. And on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona the threatened Apache trout is finding a new home, and the forest is now managed with ecology, not just lumber, in mind.”

Across China, religious belief has blossomed and flourished — far outpacing the government’s framework to control it — with a profusion of charismatic movements and a revival in traditional Chinese religions. Two-thirds of those who described themselves as religious in the 2006 survey said they were Buddhists, Taoists or worshippers of folk gods such as the Dragon King or the God of Fortune. Another popular goddess is Mazu, who is believed to protect sailors. Although she is included in the Daoist and Buddhist pantheons, she — and many other indigenous popular gods — falls outside China’s five official religions. However, the worship of Mazu recently has been reclassified as “cultural heritage” rather than religious practice, making it acceptable even for Communist Party members. Academics say that model is being used elsewhere in China for other indigenous folk religions. There are also government attempts to support traditional Chinese practices such as ancestor worship, by changing the public holidays. In 2009, the government declared the Qingming Festival — the traditional day for sweeping graves — a public holiday for the first time, allowing much larger numbers of people to sweep their ancestral graves. “Now the government supports us,” says Shao Longshan, his cheeks still tear-stained after bowing deeply in front of the grave of his late wife, Zhu Jiefen, at a cemetery on the outskirts of Shanghai during the Qingming Festival in early April. “Not only does this let the people who are alive remember those who have gone, but [it allows us to] keep the Chinese traditions and culture.”

So be sure to tune in to your local NPR station and give a listen. The transcript will most likely be up tomorrow, here. What will a revival of indigenous religion in China mean for the future? A simple counter-balance, along with Buddhism and Taoism, to the growing influence of Christianity? Or will their be a new political consciousness among those who adhere to these deities? Will these believers form new ties outside of China with Pagan, Hindu, or indigenous groups?

“Mr. Amenábar, working from an insightful script that he wrote with Mateo Gil, focuses on two moments when the ancient culture war reached a fever pitch and shows that no group is entirely innocent of violence and intolerance. Whoever is in power tries to preserve it by fair means or foul, and whoever wants power uses brutality to acquire it. So in the first half of the film the insurgent Christian mob draws pagan blood, and the beleaguered pagan elite, including Theon and Orestes, meets the threat with savagery.”

“Cliff Eakin, owner of Gryphon’s Nest campground on Bull Run Road, said he expected the bulk of the weekend’s participants to arrive today. Eakin said he had one instance of vandalism by teenagers on the campground’s sign, so he hired security personnel to protect participants in the weekend celebration … The event that started Friday night was scheduled to run through Monday. Perry Rushing, chief of operations of the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office, said he had met with Eakin, the operator of the campground, and was assured that the event would consist of people practicing their religion and would not involve anything illegal. “We have no interest in that,” Rushing said.”

Rushing, who initially said he “vehemently opposed” a Pagan festival in his Parish, now says he doesn’t expect any problems. Let’s hope he’s right, and the locals realize that the world didn’t end simply because a bunch of Pagans decided to congregate in their Parish for a weekend of camping and celebrating.

“My first subject of study is Alternative Right, a particularly noxious website that brands itself as “radical traditionalist.” For those who aren’t familiar with the term, radical traditionalist is a term used by hipsters, goths and faux-erudite who espouse fascist ideology but want a term with more intellectual cache. Radical traditionalist favorites include Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and Alain de Benoist. Associated (allegedly) political movements include Eurasianism, metapolitics, third positionism and national anarchism. Alternative right is an exemplar of radical traditionalism and fascism in as much as it begins with hatred of minorities, women and the working class and proceeds to construct a bizarre mish-mash of gobbledygook as “ideology” after the fact.”

“One interview illustrated the difficulties faced by non-Christians quite clearly. Rev. Billy Baughaum of the International Conference of Evangelical Chaplain Endorsers, a retired military chaplain, verbally and physically expressed absolute disgust and revulsion for the Wiccan faith, openly mocking it. At one point in his interview, he said, “I think the Wicca religion is repulsive, however if there’s a Wicca [sic] chaplain who comes, I will swallow my grimace, but I believe the first amendment, he has a right or she has a right to pray to the horned god of the north. … Although I think it’s a bunch of baloney personally … if that’s what they want to pray to I will put on my greens again and get in a foxhole and I’ll support their right to do that.” A statement that he believes in first amendment rights is not a commitment to neutrality in actually helping servicemembers in need of spiritual counsel. How genuinely can someone serve another spiritually when they are attempting to “swallow my grimace” and disguise hatred and contempt for the person seeking help? I cannot imagine feeling comfortable in the office of a chaplain who openly and publicly states that other religions are false and that they find them repulsive; that hatred cannot help but transfer over to the individual practicing the hated faith.”

“Here is what I do know: For twenty-five years, I have been a Pagan, and for all of those years, I have felt that I am weaving something, a kind of cloth or tapestry, together with my friends. Paganism is so new, and, when it is working well, so warming and so full of hospitality, that for me at least, the heart of my experience as a Pagan has been the weaving together all of our separate lives to form one fabric, one community honoring the earth and the old gods. I’ve never cared particularly who called himself a shaman, who a Witch or a Hellene or a Druid, because I have felt it in my bones how much we are woven together as kin. Believe it or not, today is the first day I have properly understood: the whole time I have been weaving, weaving my life and the lives of those I love into this fabric, time has been unweaving it again at the other end. Alexei has died. And part of the world is gone.”

For those who can make it, the wake will be Tuesday, 1st of June, from 2pm-5pm and from 7pm-10pm at Gleason Funeral Home 149-20 Northern Blvd, Flushing, 11358. The funeral, Wednesday, 2nd of June, 10:45am, St Andrew Avellino 158th Street and Northern Blvd, Flushing.

“‘Night of Pan’ is a seven and a half minute film featuring film auteur Kenneth Anger and actor Vincent Gallo. The film has been screened in various versions internationally – Beijing, Lisbon, Cannes, Athens, Rome, Berlin and elsewhere, but never in Butler’s base, Los Angeles. In the film, Anger, Gallo, and Butler depict an occult ritual that symbolizes the stage of ego death in the process of spiritual attainment.”

If you’re going to do a short ritualistic art-film, there’s no finer stamp of approval than getting Kenneth Anger (the undisputed master of the genre, and long-time Thelemite) to co-star in it. After it’s finished making the festival rounds, maybe they’ll post the whole thing to Youtube?

“[Alejandro] Amenabar said at the ceremony in the Academy building that it had been “a great year for Spanish cinema” and was quick to push the worth of his fellow nominees, Agora co-scriptwriter Mateo Gil and lead actress Rachel Weisz.”

Now if we can only get a release date! Perhaps the new flurry of international acclaim and press will speed things along?

“L’Osservatore said the film “gets bogged down by a spiritualism linked to the worship of nature.” Similarly, Vatican Radio said it “cleverly winks at all those pseudo-doctrines that turn ecology into the religion of the millennium.” “Nature is no longer a creation to defend, but a divinity to worship,” the radio said.”

Reminder: We are in the midst of our first annual Winter Pledge Drive! If you value this blog, its mission, and its content, please consider making a donation to keep The Wild Hunt open, ad-free, and updated daily. Spread the word, and thanks to all who have donated so far!

“It was, most likely, intended as a joke. But it isn’t really very funny. Especially since the next verse reads, “May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.” The passage goes on the same way–asking God to pulverize this poor fellow–that he lose all his worldly goods, that his orphans be abandoned, that his father be remembered as a sinner, and finally, that “his memory be cut off from the earth.” Thus, the “Prayer for Obama,” does more than anticipate that he leaves office; it entreats God to destroy the president.”

Supporters and opponents of this prayer are battling it out at Cafe Press, with stores being removed and reinstated. Meanwhile, pundits are split on whether this is harmless fun, or yet another sign that far-right Christianity is coming unglued and “trawling for assassins”. How should Pagans and occultists, many of whom believe in the power of magic and intention, react to these sort of stories? Harmless? Or the beginning of a particularly nasty egregore?

“Sysoyev also worked with former members of religious sects and wrote a book on Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovahs’ Witnesses. He also spoke out against nationalists and Stalinists, whom he criticized on his blog for ignoring the murder of innocent people.”

“Alejandro Amenabar’s intellectual epic that had sat without a U.S. buyer for six months, has found a stateside home. Newmarket Films has picked up U.S. rights to the Rachel Weisz starrer and is prepping a release for the first half of 2010.”

“Next, he introduced a 10-minute (rough cut, the sound was incomplete) clip of The Wicker Tree (2010), which follows The Wicker Man in “style” and slightly in story. The clip was not a 10-minute chunk but rather snippets of various scenes in the film. Beth (Brittania Nicol) is a born-again Christian music star with a haughty Britney Spears past and a cowboy boyfriend, Steve (Henry Garrett). Both are missionaries sent by their reverend to bring the “Lord’s love” to Scotland. During their trip, Beth’s beau takes a dip in some sacred springs with a voluptuous libertine only to find himself in another scene cornered by the strange townsfolk singing and out for blood.”

Sounds like fun! Lets hope it holds a candle to the original movie, and doesn’t fall in the horribleness of the ill-advised 2006 remake. They also seem to all-but-confirm that Sir Christopher Lee will be making a cameo as Lord Summerisle, linking the two films together into the same shared universe. Needless to say I await more news of the film, including its release date.

“Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group is considering a bid for U.S. distribution rights to Alejandro Amenabar’s ancient historical epic “Agora,” starring Rachel Weisz. “Agora’s” boffo performance at the Spanish B.O. in recent weeks has sparked renewed interest in the film, which is being shopped domestically by John Sloss’ Cinetic Media and overseas by Focus Features Intl. … Bowing in Spain on Oct. 9, “Agora” scored the highest opening of the year, and to date has cumed $25 million dollars. It’s topped the box office there over the past four weekends, and even bested the debut of Michael Jackson topliner “This Is It,” from Sony, during the Oct. 30-Nov. 1 frame. Pre-AFM, other territories Focus Intl. had sold include France, Germany, Scandinavia and Greece. Rights have been sold for Taiwan and Thailand as well.”

Director Alejandro Amenabar is apparently also willing to cut 20 minutes from the film in order to make it run a tidy two hours, further tempting the bean-counters at Sony (and Fox, who are also expressing interest). Could we be lucky enough to see a winter release here in America? Or possibly early Spring? We’ll keep our eyes open.

I know it, like the original, completely mangles Greek myth, but I have to admit that I had a little geek-tingle from the younger Jason who watched the original like a million times on cable when I was a kid. I also kind of hope they keep the symphonic metal soundtrack they utilize in the trailer, I mean, it’s not historical anyway, so let’s go all out! “Clash of the Titans” is due out in March.

“The president of the Religious Anti-Defamation Observatory, Antonio Alonso Marcos, has sent an open letter to Amenabar, also know for his pro-euthanasia film “The Sea Inside,” denouncing the film’s anti-Christian bias. “The reason for my letter is to make you realize something that you already know but have dismissed as unimportant: your film is going to awaken hatred against Christians in today’s society. You present a biased view of the relationship between science and the Church, between faith and reason. It has been pointed out to you directly and indirectly, and you have used a somewhat vague excuse and looked the other way,” Marcos wrote.”

“The movie denounces people who at a certain moment stop debating ideas, set aside reason, have no room for dialogue and resort to violence. This happened 1,600 years ago and it continues happening today…”

As for the film, it is still looking for distributors in America, and once/if it does, expect more cries of protest from those who would like everyone to forget that Christians weren’t always the persecuted, but instead acted as persecutors as well.

“…there is much in the picture to sustain sympathetic interest, including its dedicated historical perspective, intellectual seriousness and credible presentation of epic film elements that have often tripped up filmmakers in the past. Then there is the physical side of the production, which is genuinely impressive. Lensing entirely in Malta, Amenabar has fleshed out real locations with extensive sets and helpful (and largely undetectable) CGI extensions to provide a striking impression of a legendary ancient city. Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas has mixed traditional Greco-Roman style buildings with Egyptian motifs and various interior decorative influences to palpably evoke a Mediterranean port city where many cultures convened. Gabriella Pescucci’s costumes colorfully support this approach, and Xavi Gimenez’s widescreen lensing captures it all with colorful mobility. Dario Marianelli’s score is rich, with occasional swells into the bombastic.”

“Classicists are going to have a field day with Alejandro Amenábar‘s Agora, which premiered yesterday at the Cannes film festival. Starring Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, the 4th- to 5th-century Alexandrian astronomer, philosopher and mathematician, who was brutally killed by an angry Christian mob, it avoids some of the pitfalls of movies set in the ancient world. The characters behave naturally and speak normally, without either jolting archaisms or ridiculous anachronisms, and the world that has been created to stand in for Alexandria – a huge set on Malta – works well, with minimum CGI nastiness and an obvious attention to historical detail. The costumes and the “look” of the characters was based on Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits, said Amenábar at his press conference, and that was deftly done.”

“Rachel had accepted the part, but then she grew worried about that solitude, so she called me one day to talk,” Amenabar recalls. “I told her, ‘Remember, I’m not offering you the part of the scientist’s wife. You are the scientist. And you are very much in love — you’re just in love with the sky.’ ”

So it looks like “Agora” really will be a treat for Pagan film-goers once it sees wide release in December. Prepare to ramp up your expectations! I can’t wait to see this one on the big screen.